Towards the Italian CSLU Toolkit

The "digits" small-vocabulary task is important for many telephone-based applications such as computer-assisted long-distance dialing or credit-card billing, requires extremely high accuracy, and focuses research on acoustic-level processing. On the other hand, in many other tasks a speaker-independent domain-specific vocabulary (such as "collect call", "calling card", "operator", or "help") needs to be recognized. For such tasks, a "general-purpose" (gp) recognizer that is capable of recognizing all permissible phoneme strings in a language is required. The more recent results obtained by the application of the CSLU Toolkit frame- based hybrid HMM/ANN architecture on these recognition tasks for the Italian language are described. This work is inserted in a project whose aim is to contribute to the " Italianization " of the CSLU Toolkit and to support the dissemination of these tools and technologies.